Brian & Kitrina Wright
Seth: Today I have the good fortune to be interviewing a very interesting business. We've got Brian Wright with us today from FA Bean Counters Dot Com. Brian, thank you so much for joining us today, and if you could introduce who you've got with you, that would be great.
Brian: Yeah, thanks for having me. With me I have my co-founder, both in business and in life, Kitrina Wright, my wife.
Kitrina: Hello.
Seth: Hi. Mr. and Mrs. Wright. All right. I'm sure you guys get that a lot.
Brian: Yes, we do. I got a lot of mileage out of that in high school with all my friends' moms.
Seth: Ah, I won't take the bait on that one. How did you get started in terms of FA Bean, how did you get started in the industry, and then how did you get to FA Bean Counters?
Brian: Sure. Well, I am a certified financial planner by trade, so I've been in the industry 10 plus years, working first in the banking industry and then I moved over to fee-only financial planning, working with high network clients. Then a couple of years ago, I left my job-job, where I worked for a boss-boss, and started my own firm, my own financial planning firm. Along the way, and I'm rewinding back 10 years when I started in the industry, my wife had started her own accounting practice at that time. I was working at a firm. She went out on her own, kind of started at 0 clients, and over the last 10 years has been building an accounting practice.
Fast forward back to 2 years ago, I left my firm, kind of joined forces with her, started our own financial advisory practice. She had a 10 year old plus accounting practice, doing accounting, bookkeeping. She's a CPA, so those are her skill sets, accounting, tax, bookkeeping. We went into business doing the financial planning, startup for a financial planning firm. Well, during that process, we met up and we were introduced to a very influential thought leader in our industry by the name of Michael Kitces, and got to know him pretty well, he and Alan Moore as well. They're both co-founders of XY Planning Network, which is a professional network for like-minded, very tech focused financial planners all over the country, all over the world I guess, international, some members.
We were introduced to them, got to know them pretty well. We are a member of that network, XY Planning Network, and just in that friendship, they approached us really and said, "Hey. There's a need in our industry for outsource bookkeeping for financial advisors. We see a huge opportunity. This is a skill set that a financial planner, although financial planners are very smart people, accounting and bookkeeping, double entry bookkeeping, debits-credits, not in the wheelhouse of most financial advisors. This is something that they could easily outsource. It's something they shouldn't be spending their time on. It's not revenue generating. They should be spending every waking moment with clients or working on clients, or trying to find clients. Bookkeeping is something they could easily outsource, and there is no one out there in the marketplace that's targeting financial advisors. There are a number of virtual bookkeepers out there, yes, but we have a lot of moving parts in our industry with compliance and things like that."
They said, "We see a huge opportunity for an accounting practice targeting specifically financial advisors." He was like, "We want to launch this accounting practice. The problem is we don't know anything about running an accounting practice. Fortunately, Brian and Kitrinado." That's kind of how Bean Counters came along, just partnering with an uber-influential thought leader in a particular niche, and it was an easy question for us to answer, and easy decision to make, certainly, partnering with someone of the caliber and influential level of Michael. That's what we did last summer. Last summer we launched,
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